A method for assessing the success and failure of community-level interventions in the presence of network diffusion, social reinforcement, and related social effects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new evaluation method for community interventions that accounts for social diffusion and reinforcement effects, demonstrated through a suicide prevention program in Alaska Native villages.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel evaluation approach that disentangles social influences affecting community intervention outcomes, addressing challenges of social diffusion and reinforcement.

Findings

Method effectively separates social effects from intervention impacts.

Application to Alaska Native villages shows promising results.

Explores eight sociological measures of intervention effects.

Abstract

Prevention and intervention work done within community settings often face unique analytic challenges for rigorous evaluations. Since community prevention work (often geographically isolated) cannot be controlled in the same way other prevention programs and these communities have an increased level of interpersonal interactions, rigorous evaluations are needed. Even when the `gold standard' randomized control trials are implemented within community intervention work, the threats to internal validity can be called into question given informal social spread of information in closed network settings. A new prevention evaluation method is presented here to disentangle the social influences assumed to influence prevention effects within communities. We formally introduce the method and it's utility for a suicide prevention program implemented in several Alaska Native villages. The results show promise to explore eight sociological measures of intervention effects in the face of social diffusion, social reinforcement, and direct treatment. Policy and research implication are discussed.